Around midnight Jen and I went to bed but there was still little wind... just a heavy snowfall. However, within the next two hours, you could hear the wind increasing outside as the storm barreled towards the Cape and New England.
I had a terrible time sleeping that night since there was this constant faint roar of the ever increasing wind... plus worrying if the power was going to go out.... thank goodness it never did! I awoke around 4am and looked outside only to find an almost total white out with about 8 inches of snow already on the ground. Going back to bed, I did manage to sleep until 7am that morning.
The intense Nor'easter's full power finally reached the Cape around 9am with blizzard conditions that lasted at full strength until about 5pm that night. The shear power of mother nature became clear as snow fell at over 3" per hour all day long and winds were clocked between 55-78mph on the Cape and even hit 84mph on Nantucket that morning!.... 74mph is a classifed as a Category 1 hurricane. I have never been in a hurricane but experiencing winds of over 74mph with this storm was down right incredible! I can't even begin to imagine the poor people in Florida going through 100+ mph storms. Even at 74mph, several 80-90ft tall pine trees in our yard bent, creaked, moaned and swayed at 45 deg angles under the wind's power.
It was truly a storm to remember and one that will go down in the record books. Final snowfall reports came in between 20-36" on Cape Cod and 20-38" in Boston and the North and South Shores. We ended up with ~31" here at out home in East Dennis. With these types of snow totals, it became the 5th worst blizzard in Boston's history and the worst on Cape Cod in close to 100 yrs
Below are some photos Jen and I took on Monday morning the 24th.
© Chris Cook 2005